The 12 Principles of Animation - Episode 11

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The Eleventh Principle - Solid Drawing

Standing dude from 2020 that I never continued working on - but trust me, I was going to make him move ;-; It seems I unintentionally tried to understand the ins and outs of this principle with the guidelines on this animation

HOME STRETCH, BABY! LET'S GO! 

The principle of solid drawings depicts forms with volume and weight in order to give the illusion that something is in 3D. Because volume helps audience grasp the character's shape and presence in its world better, even 2D characters and environments should feel like they have a full third dimension to move in (unless it's an artistic choice not to do so, like in Peppa the Pig or with Mickey Mouse).

And how to do this in practise? By reducing every drawing and figure down to basic 3D shapes, such as cubes, cylinders, spheres, torus those basic Blender shapes. For example, a head isn't a circle but a sphere and by drawing the guiding lines on it as if around a three-dimensional ball, it helps not only you - the animator - but also the audience to get a clear image of where the character is facing at, what the character looks like from different angles and understand how it moves in its surroundings. 

Despite sounding more like a 2D-animation exclusive, the foundations of solid drawings are relevant across the board. Have you ever seen people in public with their sketchbooks looking around for a moment, then back again at their drawings? Or maybe you have seen people show spreads of their sketchbooks filled with drawings of birds or humans drawn from different angles? Drawing and stalki- I mean observing from life reinforce understanding of human anatomy, bone and muscle structure, weight, balance and even the body's range of motion - in short, understanding of three-dimensionality. This is why 3D-artists are recommended to draw, not necessarily well but to some extent. Solid drawings enhance your animations by:

1- keeping proportions consistent: some of my source videos noted that this principle should really be called the principle of consistency, as the main "goal" of solid drawings is to keep proportions consistent. Of course this applies more for 2D animators, but that's not to say consistency problems with proportions don't appear in 3D-animated media as well - sometimes slight adjustments to rigs can mess up the whole mesh, and it's very visible when this is the case. 

2- increasing clarity and readability: solid drawings accomplish one of the main goals of animation by helping the audience visualize the character's shape and environment around them clearer. This clarity also helps the audience immerse themselves in the animation they are watching and to realize the possibilities of what the characters could do next and how.

3- adding volume: we aren't cardboard cutouts, so adding some volume to your animations also makes things more realistic.

4- tracking weight, balance and range of motion: this is for both 2D and 3D animators. Tracking these three things ensures your character feels like a three-dimensional being in a three-dimensional world. 

Challenges:

A more complex and difficult principle like solid drawings naturally presents itself with more challenges than the others. This time I've listed three of the challenges I could come up with:

Not knowing how the character looks like from different angles/perspectives

- Let's imagine you're an animator or even just an illustrator and your client tells you to draw a very specific character they've come up with, but with no references. Sounds hard right? Not knowing how your characters look makes animating a lot more difficult than it already is.

- Creating character concepts, reference sheets and turnarounds is extremely helpful when animating anything. Alan Becker instructed that one should start from solid shapes - the 3D ones - when building a character to better visualize its form. This I believe is called the rough pass. He also advised to prefer curved lines over straight lines for a more natural and dynamic look. Finally when you have your concept ready to go, you can use it to draw your character over and over again to learn to draw them from any angle. Then I bet you'll feel a sense of relief that your work has not only become faster, but a lot easier as well - and all it took was to make a few beautiful illustrations on the side!  

Perspective

- My greatest enemy... As much as I don't like admitting it, I believe practising perspective is mandatory for any aspiring professional artist, and especially animators and storyboard artists. Because if the perspective is off, your audience will become befuddled of what size everything is, where everything is located in relation to the characters and so on. Nothing makes sense anymore.  

- Good methods to practise perspective is to draw a grid on the ground of your animations to understand the distance of characters as well as what kind of angle they should be drawn from. Observing life is another one, and a quick shortcut for adding perspective-accurate backgrounds to your animations is by modeling them in Blender for instance.   

Avoiding twinning

- This one concerns especially 3D-animators. Twinning means the symmetrical movement of paired features like arms and legs. This could happen for example with a character landing and both of their feet land at the exact same time and at the exact same angle - it's like if you flipped the animation horizontally, it looks the exact same. It's a quick method to draw anything - guilty as charged - but in motion it can look unnatural and a bit boring.    

- How to avoid twinning but still be fast? If you're a perfectionist like me, you can't. But you can avoid twinning by leaning the pose on one side more or unbalance it in some way - maybe the character's right foot lands a bit before the left one. Just remember not to overdo it, otherwise your character might look like they're about to fall over.

Alan Becker drew a rough pass of this character first (left) then a simplified 2D-version of it. This comparison in my opinion highlights how much easier the solid one is to understand as opposed to the one on the right which I'm wondering if his right shoulder is just naturally higher than the left one

Practise exercises:

- Banana spinning around: turnaround animation for a banana, so you can picture how it looks from different angles

- Cube moving around: I'd recommend not to make it just slide, but rotate from side to side, side-side to side as if someone pushed it. Remember though that cube isn't the same as square!

- Character turning or spinning around: similar to the banana, this helps you visualize your character in a 3D environment and understand its shape. Headshot is enough if it seems like too much work, especially with hand-drawn animation

I hope you enjoyed reading or even skimming through my blog. Feel absolutely free to comment more ideas or even share your own animations! I'd love to hear and see some of what you can come up with for practising this principle! And with that...

Thank you for reading and see you next post, with the final principle!